"One man telling me I’m attractive for the rest of my life — that’s never gonna be enough," betrothed comic Dani Klein laments in her autobiographical monologue, "The Move," at Stages Theatre Center. "I was an ugly teenager. I need male attention in bulk."
That’s why Klein, like her ‘Move’ alter ego, couldn’t bear to pack up her dingy Manhattan bachelorette apartment during four agonizing weeks last summer. It didn’t matter that she had another flat and a hunky fiancé-to-be in Hollywood. "My New York apartment represented my freedom," says the brash, witty comedian, who is in her early 30s. "It represented the ‘Sex and the City’ lifestyle where you dress and eat and party however you want…. So I got the moving boxes, but I just couldn’t do it. After I canceled the movers the second time, I thought, ‘This is a play.’"
The Jewish writer-performer was following the lead of comics such as Julia Sweeney, Tim Bagley and Margaret Cho, who’ve turned their lives into one-person shows. "Stand-up comedy is a limiting art form, because people want you to be sarcastic and angry, never emotional," Klein explains. "So you get frustrated and want something more."
After Manhattan’s PSNBC Theater approached Klein in March, it took her just three weeks to write "The Move" — about an engaged woman battling her urge to keep her New York apartment and stay wild and single forever. In the play, cute but diabolical puppets symbolize Klein’s inner demons. "I smashed them in an early version of the show," she reveals. "But [Stages artistic director] Arye Gross said, ‘You can’t do that. The puppets symbolize your inner negative voices, and they never die.’"
Klein’s interior demons — and her aversion to moving — started when she was 10 and her family relocated from Manhattan to the WASPy town of Westport, Conn. "I became the ‘class Jew,’" she recalls. "I got chased around the playground and called a ‘kike.’"
When young Dani entered a beauty pageant, the judges passed her over for a little blond girl with ringlets. "They didn’t even notice my personality," Klein indignantly told her parents. "You’re Jewish — that’s all the personality they need," her mother retorted.
At 15, Klein says she signed up for an Israel teen tour "to go where being Jewish wasn’t a distinguishing characteristic." She fell in love with the Jewish State but was dismayed when some cute sabra guys called her "fat."
Back home, she reduced on a six-month diet of lettuce and mozzarella sticks and went off to Dartmouth a babe. "All I wanted to be was the pretty girl, and I had a new boyfriend every semester," she recalls. "I stayed on the three-month plan with men until I met Tod [a Scottish-American] film editor, in 1999."
The patient eventually ensnared Klein via a technique she calls "The Taming of the Jew." After she finally packed up her Manhattan apartment, he proposed last Rosh Hashana, enrolled in University of Judaism classes and converted to Judaism. "His enthusiasm for the religion is contagious," says the previously secular Klein, who now attends Sinai Temple and observes elements of Shabbat and kashrut with Tod. "He’s become Uber-Jew."
She’ll worry about another potential move after their wedding on Oct. 28. "Maybe Tod will become Orthodox and I’ll have to move with him to Brooklyn and wear a sheitl," she says with a laugh.
For information about "The Move," call (323) 465-1010.
